Foreign in a domestic sense: Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and paradoxes in critical urban studies

The 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis is as instructive as it is sad, reflective of the familiar pressures of late modern capitalism (namely neoliberalisation, financialisation, crisis, and austerity) as well as its own unique dynamics percolating through four hundred years of colonialism and a century of legal subjugation to Washington, DC. Neither one-off explanations of fiscal crisis nor casual conflation with other cases suffice to adequately account for this, or any other, public sector debt crises. Puerto Rico is both foreign and domestic, it is neither state nor municipality but its bonds are treated as such, it reflects larger trends and is circumscribed by its own unique history, subtle economic explanations are matched by bald, large-P politics. Analytical conundrums such as these are confounding and lead to perennial, potentially circular and irresolvable, debate in the critical urban studies literature. This paper explores whether the possibility of using the philosophical notion of paradox – a situation where sound reasoning leads to incomplete, unsatisfying, or unexpected results or consequences – and Zeno’s famous paradoxes in particular, can serve as allegorical heuristics capable of provoking new theories, expectations, or assumptions in urban studies.